


i'm not in the swing of things

by iiiOpheliaiii



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Psychic Abilities, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:07:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27960491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiiOpheliaiii/pseuds/iiiOpheliaiii
Summary: In Cold Oak Dean held his little brother up off the muddy ground, eyes rolling, jacket bloody. Bobby, shooting from a distance, the weight of Sam’s head. The cold soaking through the knees of his jeans.These are the things Dean remembers from Cold Oak.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18
Collections: HBO Supernatural





	i'm not in the swing of things

**Author's Note:**

> i watch the alternate supernatural in my head. i almost completely ignore canon, and the most important canon fact to me is the way jared padalecki looks in season 1

Sam’s hair is greasy. His jacket is damp and he smells of rain.

Dean watches his brother pour salt – and God, it’s so easy to forget what people normal use it for – over oily yellow fries that he doesn’t want to eat, only just stopped bitching about it. His hands are still shaking – his wrist jerks so he pours way too much on.

 _Sam is twenty-three_ , Dean reminds himself, but that never works so it doesn’t work now, and he reaches over and takes the saltshaker off him, replaces it with a plastic fork because Sam’s just like that, and says “eat.”

He’s already done all his bitching so he does. Dean focuses on his burger, keeps half an eye on Sam anyway.

It’s mid-afternoon, and the place is sunlit and busy. Cutlery clinking, the coffee machine, the kid practically yelling a few booths over.

It’s too many _potential witnesses victims_ people for Sammy right now, Dean can tell. He’s like a pot about to boil over, simmering for too long now. What’s gonna happen is that he’s gonna scream, he’s gonna hit him, he’s gonna say shit he maybe means maybe doesn’t, and then after he does all that, after Dean has to deal with all that, he’s gonna cry.

He’s been quiet since Cold Oak –

In Cold Oak Dean held his little brother up off the muddy ground, eyes rolling, jacket bloody. Bobby, shooting from a distance, the weight of Sam’s head. The cold soaking through the knees of his jeans. These are the things Dean remembers from Cold Oak.

Bobby, in the front of the Impala, gripping the wheel. Sam laid out in the back, head in Dean’s lap, trying to talk, trying to pat Dean on the arm like he was old and brave and this was ok if only Dean would see that it was.

Dean hadn’t let it be ok. He’d taken Sam’s cold hand, held it probably too tight, smoothed his thumb over the back of it too frantically to be comforting, but it wasn’t like Sam was focusing anyway. His eyes had finally closed, jaw slack and Dean had felt something grip him hard inside his chest.

“Drive faster,” he’d tried to tell Bobby, “for fuck’s sake, hurry up,” he’d tried to shout, but it wouldn’t come out, just noiseless fear.

Bobby’d driven fast enough. He got coffee for Dean in the hospital which scalded his mouth, and he’d said soft comforting things that Dean hadn’t heard because his ears were buzzing and he felt sick.

And then Sam had woken up, sore, but his skin was unbroken, his flesh uncut.

 _Ok, everything’s perfect forever now_ , Dean had felt, not consciously, wild with relief in the clinical white of the place, too happy to think about how unnatural it was, for a brief minute. And then –

“I think,” his brother choking out, unhappy and confused. “I think it was him. He stopped me from dying. In my dream, I. He. I’m his favourite, so - ”

Dean had shushed him, but it was true, he knew it.

And that kind of thing can’t just happen to someone, so now.

Well, Dean had been an FBI agent to get them out of there without having to let anyone know that Sam wasn’t dying, and everything had been miraculously fine for a few hours until a guy pulled a gun on Dean outside a gas station, just some mundane motherfucker tryna rob him.

Dean had been staring at the gun, thinking _Jesus fucking Christ_ and nothing else, and then the guy’s head had blown up, red grey white chunks flying everywhere, hair and blood streaming outwards like the world’s worst firework.

A frantic moment of _what_ , until seeing Sam, very pale, eyes very wide, nose bleeding. _Oh._

_Oh God, not this. Not fucking this. Are you fucking with me? Have you had enough yet?_

And then he had to accept it and get Sammy in the car before he hurled everywhere, or tried to kill himself for being evil or something.

Now Sammy shoves a fry in his mouth. Keeps his eyes on the Formica tabletop. Dean is vaguely surprised he’s actually eating.

They are a little oasis of silence in the messy diner. Dean decides, several times, to break it, but loses his nerve at the last minute.

There’s none of the horrible begging to be murdered that Sam’s been making Dean listen to. Just staring down at the table. In the car he’d looked at his hands, still except for when Dean had pulled over, letting him vomit on the road between his shoes.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Sam puts down the fork, spits a half-chewed fry into a napkin.

“Yeah it was.”

“Did you mean to do it?”

He shakes his head quickly, like a guilty, frightened child.

“No, but - ”

“No buts, Sammy.”

Sam’s eyes flicker to him, mutinous.

“Dad said - ”

“Dammit, I don’t give a fuck what Dad said. I don’t wanna hear another word about that, not one word.”

Sam takes that literally, goes quiet again. The drive to the nearest motel reminds Dean of his brother’s teenage years, when he’d sit in the car, or on his bed, or wherever they’d leave him, fuming wordlessly, thinking neither of them could tell.

He’d gone kind of poisonous for a few years, really.

The motel room is pale green wallpaper, floral quilts. They’re not on a hunt. They’ve nowhere to go, nothing to talk about.

Nothing to talk about except the fact that Sam just murdered a guy by accident, because he’s half demon.

Sam’s not half demon.

He feels like he has to make up for the thought.

“Look,” he starts. Sam is looking, at the yellow-stained ceiling, from where he’s laid out on his made bed. Has been for twenty minutes.

“I understand - ”

“How the fuck could you understand?” Sam’s already raising his voice, already sounds like they’re a lot further along in this conversation. “How could you possibly get anything about this?”

“I understand,” he starts again, louder. “That this is a lot to deal with. But we’re gonna deal with it. We can get this under control.”

“Fuck, Dean! We can’t! I don’t have any control over this, I never have, I never will!”

“Ok, and if you can’t control it, how is it your fault?”

“I should be able to …I should be able to control it.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“Max could! Ava could!”

“The only one we’re gonna blame is the demon that did this, Sam, you understand? You’re alive. You’re alive. That’s good enough for me, ok?”

He hears a car pull up outside, blaring rap he doesn’t recognise. Beyond that, the constant hum of the nearby motorway.

“Ok?”

“I’m tired.”

Fuck.

“We’re gonna have to talk about this tomorrow.”

He sounds like Sam, but this is something that even on a practical level, they’re just gonna have to deal with.

No answer, so he turns on the TV. Watches _Die Hard_ on low volume from about halfway through.

He didn’t grow up in motel rooms and his father’s car for nothing – Dean knows how to spend hours in uncomfortable silence, knows how to waste time.

Sam knows too – his pretence of sleep would fool anyone else.

*

It takes getting used to – it’s not easy but Dean makes himself, because someone’s gotta handle this and it’s not gonna be Sam, who’s the same but so alien now.

When he gets tired, loses focus, the radio starts hissing static. Glass cracks and shatters. He startles awake from a nightmare and the lights blow. In the South Carolina night a guy, some drunk out with his drunk friends, tries to start a fight outside a bar – the bottle he’s holding goes, then the windscreen of the truck he’s leaning against, in a glittering shower.

Sam breathes slow and deep on purpose, but trying to stay calm only gets him more scared as it doesn’t work around him – things keep creaking and breaking no matter what he does. That dude’s head still exploded. He looks so scared when the guy keeps yelling shit.

 _It’s not because you’re fucking scary_ , Dean wants to say to the son of a bitch. _It’s because you might die_.

Sam keeps his fists clenched, breathes all determined.

The guy’s friends decide that four against two doesn’t seem too bad – there’s a fight, and Sam, after a minute, chills out enough to help. It all works out, but there’s the moment before where they’re wondering, like they always are these days, if Sam’s gonna kill them.

“We gotta get this under control,” Dean admits, once they’ve gotten into the car. He doesn’t look at his brother, keeps his eyes on the neon blue name of the bar.

“I don’t know how, but we will. Hey, maybe you should try yoga.”

Silence. Fine.

“Yeah, yoga. We’ll get you legwarmers or something, and you can - ”

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying,” and now he starts to pull out, wants to get back out on the road to make Louisiana in good time.

It starts to pour down, battering the Impala. He puts on the wipers.

“You’re not evil, Sam. If you say anything about Dad I’m gonna fucking hit you,” he says quickly, because his brother’s turned into a broken record.

“You’re not evil. You didn’t hurt those guys. Well, you did, but on purpose, without using your mind, so it’s a win. Dad was.”

The roar of other cars as they pass, the constant drone of water.

“Dad was, um, he was dying and he was obsessive. Stop asking me to kill you,” and then he kind of has to blink a lot at the road for a while.

“I know you think that you, you need to be stopped or you’re terrible or whatever crap you got stewing in your head all the time, which just proves that yeah, you went to college but I’m definitely smarter than you because that’s bullshit.”

He finally glances at Sam, who is picking at his nails, lips pressed together in a thin line. His head’s ducked down, face covered by his stupid hair.

“Right, Sammy?”

Sam swallows. Drags a rough sleeve across his face.

“I said, right?”

He won’t look at Dean, but he looks up, fixes his gaze out the droplet-covered window.

“Right.”

It’s forced, barely audible, but it’s better than the nothing Dean’s been getting over the past two weeks, so he’ll take it.

“Ok. It’s gonna be ok.

They don’t talk after that. Sam falls asleep, eventually, young young face against the door. Dean turns the radio on real low and waits for it to start cutting out.

**Author's Note:**

> please comment and tell me what you thought!


End file.
